I think his point is that AI is not creating new problems. It may solve "the Riemann hypothesis" but may completely fail to posit a "Mythos hypothesis" which is vital to advance the field. In fact, achieving the former may make the latter even harder because it will disincentivize production of human mathematics which has till now been the only source of "interesting" problems.
FWIW this is my understanding of his argument and I am not a mathematician.
Have we asked AI to create new interesting math problems? XD
Yes, many mathematicians have.
As Tao points out, merely suggesting new open questions isn't really sufficient. Part of what gives these problems their fame is their notoriety, their difficulty, the fact that many prodigious mathematicians have spent an evening or week or month or several years studying it.
It wouldn't be as interesting if it had just been solved by the fifth random mathematician who considered it
Notably, gardening a new field of study in math is somewhat nontrivial. You have to introduce the field, illustrate some relevance or connections, and then - and this is key - not solve all of the low-hanging fruit yourself! Because you need somebody else to become an expert in that particular field.
The analog in programming is: if a large company merely open sources a product that's decent but not great and in a language nobody wants to maintain, but they don't commit to maintaining it themselves.
Suddenly there's a bit of a vacuum because in order to provide something of value, you either need to:
1. Implement something more complete than was initially open sourced
2. Or maintain something in a horrendous language while incrementally improving it and keeping it relevant
3. Or rewrite it into a tolerable and maintainable modern language.
What the large company has done is create a vacuum in the tool space where you now require extreme motivation to get someone else to step in.
Note that in this scenario, in 2026, it's actually not such a big deal. I think several recent models could happily translate it into a more maintainable language themselves or happily maintain it in the original crufty one. And so the question is: which parts of this analogy are true in math, too?
Mathematics isn't art. It doesn't gain its value in human affairs from being interesting to study. I fail to see why we should cater to that.
I think everyone is conflating a few things:
* (1) Mathematics, the true things known by humans
* Mathematics, the things that are true
* (3) Mathematics, the institution which gets funding and manages resources to expand and maintain 1
AI agents can discover more true things, but that doesn't necessarily expand 1 and it might undermine 3
If someone is worried about 3 and you're talking about 2, then you are talking past each other
Yes, open source isn't art either, yet my point is that the same principle applies to both
There are many ways to stop progress and productivity
What is it, if not an art?
Truth.
What is truth if we are free to pick our axioms?
The universe is either Euclidean or not. If it were, how can theorems on non-Euclidean geometry be true?
You pick your axioms and you see what must be true. With math and logic, we can reason about any possible universe even though we live in only one of them.
A science?
It isn’t even as constrained by material reality as mixing oil paints to get a certain effect is.
Nope. Science demands empirical verification. Math doesn't. No theorem is violated based on experiments and observations.
Importantly, which mathematicians will understand deep useful math? Who will actually care about the knowledge we can generate at will?
Have we asked it new interesting math problems, after studing some space for an evening or a day?
The sphere of human comprehensible mathematics is finite. Once everything is solve it is not necessary to advance the field. The recurring error her is to say ai is not the product of human effort but another agent. Ai is human. Ai may well be speeding up human comprehension of math to its limits in which case there is no further need to advance the field and mathematicians might need to get a job. Why is this a bad thing?
I have never heard this theory that mathematics is finishable before.